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For about 2 or 3 years I've been using mutithreaded mplayer with multithreaded ffmpeg (now in mainline), my mobile 1.6GHz Core2 Duo can play nearly all full HD content smoothly (there are problems only in very dynamic scenes), has no problem with 10bit encoding and plays basically anything I can throw at it. A mobo with inegrated GPU and 2GHz i3 will cost less than anything with a modern nVidia GPU (HTPC cases are small so most people will have to buy a new mobo anyway).

So I simply don't get the point of all of it now. The (non existing) 4K content?!

AMD/ATi

I know you guys use Nvidia, or most of you do. But I just have to say I have never had any luck with Nvidia on any Linux system I ever built. I always ran into crash after crash and lockups. I'm not talking about two or three systems either, more like ten with all different hardware. Looking at Launch Pad bug reports, seems like many users have the same problems I did yet people still recommend Nvidia.

On the other hand, I currently use AMD/ATI cards in my boxes and finally have the pleasure of some stability; I haven't had any problems with games either. Now why is this? Is it some kind of ignorance or fanboy tendencies to use Nvidia? because I much prefer Stability.

Later today, since I'm not busy, I'm going to try Linux on some of my old boxes so I can give them away to less fortunate people. They have Voodoo, S3 Virge and other cards, I'll see how well those react. I hear the S3's should do pretty good in a 2D environment. Any of you had any luck with new distros on old systems?.

Surprisingly nobody mentioned 24p which is only possible on nvidia as far as I know. My TV is two years old now and supports a multiple of 24Hz, so I would assume most modern TV's can do it as well. All blu-ray material is in 24p.

What other choice is there? BD is the only HD format being sold nowadays.

If you're not allowed to play BluRay, then don't buy BluRay. If BluRay is the only thing being sold, then don't choose things-that-are-sold.

Personally, my own solution to their "we don't want your money" position, is to let someone else buy the disks and deal with all the hassles caused by the DRM. This keeps my dirty offensive "Linux money" (?) out of the studios' pockets, so they won't be offended by its odious qualities.

The studios have the satisfaction of knowing they're untainted by Linux users' funding, and we get to continue using Linux to play the movie files, and we save a lot of money as a side-effect. Everyone wins.

It's not a solution that I would have thought up on my own, and I don't think it's perfect, but it's the best we can do within the constraints imposed by one of the parties in question. If they ever change their minds about some sniggling minor detail that apparently no one cares about (like, oh, I don't know .. REVENUE???) then they can drop the damn "Just Say No to customers" crypto.

Later today, since I'm not busy, I'm going to try Linux on some of my old boxes so I can give them away to less fortunate people. They have Voodoo, S3 Virge and other cards, I'll see how well those react. I hear the S3's should do pretty good in a 2D environment. Any of you had any luck with new distros on old systems?.

I hope you don't have any Sis graphics in those machines, because some of those don't even have the VESA BIOS Extensions implemented correctly...

More propaganda. I've got a 9 year old Athlon64 1.8 GHz single-thread and a very modest radeon 5450 card and I'm watching a 1080p .mp4 movie with mplayer and it is using a grand total of that cpu of ...wait for it... 10%. Oh no how dare AMD use up 10% of a single thread to play a 1080p movie? How can we tolerate this? Michael I hope you read this cause I'm sick of this crap you post on your website. Soon will be time to get my linux news from a website that doesn't have an axe to grind. Like I need this along with your insane advertisement saturation?